Pilgrims Society

(Author’s Note: First published 4.2.09)

This information comes from The Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics. This site has information on many covert groups besides the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims Society | Membership list
A study of the Anglo-American Establishment

Pilgrims of Great Britain dinner, January 9, 1951. Logo and flags in background. “There are several curious things about these Pilgrims functions. In the first place there is present at these dinners an array of notables such as it would be difficult to bring together under one roof for any other purpose and by any other society… Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other members of the House of Morgan… We are entitled to know what the Pilgrim Society is, what it stands for, and who these powerful Pilgrims are that can call out the great to hear a British Ambassador expound to Americans the virtues of a united democratic front.”
– John T. Whiteford asking very reasonable questions in his 1940 pamphlet ‘Sir Uncle Sam: Knight of the British Empire’.

“[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”
– Professor Carroll Quigley, ‘Tragedy & Hope’, p. 324. Can the Pilgrims, which Quigley never mentioned, verify his story of an Anglo-American Establishment?

Sources for membership identification only appear in the membership list.

Intro
Most people have at least vaguely heard of the “Eastern Establishment”. This is a reference to a group of people in the Northeast of the United States which to many appears to wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the nation’s politics. This influence, which goes back even further than the days of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and J. P. Morgan, Sr. has been illustrated by the fact that a great number of individuals working in the senior positions of government have come from a number of New York-based banks, insurance companies and law firms, only to return to this group of banks and businesses after their public term came to an end. Often these individuals served in more than one administration, and together with a number of other peculiarities – think of controversial policies, suspected cover ups, ignored conflicts of interest, lack of media attention, etc. – some people have become suspicious of what at times appears to be almost like a permanent government. A 1962 newspaper column voiced these suspicions best:

“There is an establishment in the United States. The word “establishment” is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions largely from the Northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the White House.

“Most people are unaware of the existence of this “legitimate Mafia.” Yet the power of the establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or State Department job. It affects the nation’s policies in almost every area.

“For example, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, subsidized by Rockefeller interests since 1927 boasts a membership of at least 90 per cent establishment figures.” [1]

The WASP elite
The origins of the Eastern Establishment is hardly part of accepted, official history. Authors writing about this topic have regularly been criticized; sometimes for seeing things that aren’t there; sometimes for leaving out important aspects and missing the big picture. Some of the reasons that these discussions exist are quite obvious though:

1) there are large political and business interests involved here which like the way their system of private, behind-the-scenes conferences has evolved;
2) there’s a small group of “insiders” and huge group of “outsiders”, and because of their different lives they often are unable to understand, or refuse to understand, the other side.

What sets an elite apart from the regular population is influence: influence in domestic politics and economy, and influence in foreign politics and the world economy. This influence in many cases is hereditary, because within establishment circles it’s as much about who you know as it is about what you know. In the modern age education is crucial, and in case of the Eastern Establishment of the United States, most members send their children to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton to get a law degree or a MBA. Members of the British establishment usually go to Oxford, with Cambridge coming in second. As soon as these young students graduate they are free to join the family bank or some other establishment business. Outsiders can join “the club” by going to the right schools and befriending other members of the establishment.

The Eastern Establishment is a so-called “WASP” establishment – meaning “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. The term specifically refers to Americans of British descent, even
though there’s a similar WASP establishment in Great Britain surrounding the royal family, which is closely associated with its American counterpart. The term WASP when applied to America’s elite is somewhat inadequate. Usually its Anglo-Saxon descent and Protestant values are emphasized, followed by a general description of the historic influence of this group. Whenever the question comes up if this establishment still has great influence today few, if any, scholars come up with clear and definitive answers. Much further than throwing around terms like “Ivy League” and “old boys networks” they usually won’t go. Now, anno 2008, let’s change this and write down		The London Bush house, built in 1919 with funds provided by U.S. Pilgrim Irving T. Bush. Inscribed above the door is the text, “To the friendship of English Speaking Peoples”. The two men represent the United States and Great Britain, holding a torch to symbolize their everlasting friendship.
a detailed list of characteristics which fully describes the traditional Eastern Establishment (or WASP elite).

1. It is a social elite centered around a number of universities, a group of banks, insurance companies and law firms, and a group of influential, privately-funded foundations and think tanks.
2. It is centered in and around New York, even though at any moment a large portion of this group is active within the government and non-government institutions in Washington.
3. There is a close relationship with the British aristocracy and the British royal family via diplomatic officials, individual contacts, and private clubs.
4. The dominant religion is Protestant, in particular the Episcopal (Anglican) and Presbyterian churches.
5. British branches of Freemasonry and Templar orders are popular.
6. This is the group behind the globalization process and members are generally great supporters of the United Nations and the sustainable development movement.
7. Catholic and especially Zionist interests are not very much appreciated.

You probably heard of some of these points before and you may or may not agree with them. So how can we prove to you that this list is true? To do that we need to begin our discussion on the Pilgrims Society.

Pilgrims history At the turn of 20th century a number of influential persons were interested in bringing the establishments of the United States and Great Britain closer together. The St. George’s
Official Pilgrims logo. “Hic et Ubique” means “here and everywhere”, apparently a reference to the idea that the United States and Great Britain should stand together side by side everywhere. The eagle represents the United States; the lion Great Britain.		Society in New York, the American Society in London, and the growing network of Anglo-American League branches in England (founded by a good number of later Pilgrims Society members), were seen as inadequate, so the idea arose to form a new, elitist society with branches in both London and New York. This became the Pilgrims Society, which organized regular meetings in such prestigious hotels as the Victoria, the Waldorf Astoria, the Carlton Ritz, and the Savoy. The idea of setting up what ultimately became the Pilgrims Society was first discussed by a number of Americans working in London. One of them was Lindsay Russell, a well-connected lawyer from New York, who regularly visited London in these days to set up his law firm Alexander and Colby. It was Russell who got together with General Joseph Wheeler (on a visit in London), General Lord Roberts, and Sir Harry Brittain. Together they organized the original meeting of the Pilgrims of Great
Britain at the Carlton Hotel on July 11, 1902. The meeting was a success and two weeks later Lord Roberts was elected president of the Pilgrims; Lord Grenfell and Admiral Hedworth Lambton became vice presidents. Two other vice presidents were Americans: Senator Chauncey M. Depew (Yale Skull & Bones 1856; lawyer to Cornelius Vanderbilt; member of J.P. Morgan’s elite Corsair Club, together with William Rockefeller) and General Joseph Wheeler. Sir Harry Brittain became secretary and the Archdeacon of London, William MacDonald Sinclair, was elected chairman of the executive committee [2].

At the July 11 meeting the attendants also discussed their plans of setting up a branch in New York. Lindsay Russell and Chauncey Depew went back to the United States and approached such men as Bishop of New York Henry Codman Potter, J. P. Morgan, Sr., and former U.S. President Grover Cleveland (a good friend of the Morgan family and employed by them since at least the 1880s). Under the leadership of Bishop Potter, the Pilgrims of the United States organized their first formal diner on February 4, 1903. The two societies have been organizing meetings ever since [3].

The Pilgrims network
Over the years more and more influential persons joined the Pilgrims Society, including virtually all the well known bankers, robber barons and their associates. Going through membership lists of the Pilgrims of the United States you’ll find the following families:

Within the ranks of the British Pilgrims one comes across a great many Barons, Viscounts, Earls, Marquisses, and Dukes. Members of the British royal family have been patrons of the Pilgrims Society since its inception and regularly attend meetings. Here also well known banking families as Baring, Hambro, Harcourt, Keswick, Rothschild, Kleinwort, Loeb, and Warburg can be found, just as the heads of Barclays and the British managers of U.S. banks as Chase Manhattan and J. P. Morgan.

At the moment of this writing the membership list compiled by PEHI contains 1496 names, the vast majority of them from the United States (rough estimate: about 82% or 1227). Analyzing the biographies of these members doesn’t just show that the Pilgrims are part of the WASP elite – they are the WASP elite. The following banks, law firms, and insurance companies have been headed by Pilgrims Society members – usually for generations:

Banks

Law firms and insurance companies

Other businesses

Looking at these tables, it is clear that the major banks of New York and London have been very prominent in the Pilgrims Society, closely followed by a group of influential law firms and insurance companies. A number of corporations have also had a considerable presence in the Pilgrims, comparable to some of the law firms and smaller banks. The most prominent of these might well be IBM, of the Watson family – but the founders and owners of Chrysler, Dodge, Jardine Matheson, W.R. Grace & Co., Reynolds, Corning Glass, and Forbes have all been Pilgrims. A vast range of other corporations have been represented by Pilgrims, but do not appear to have been part of the core of the Anglo-American establishment.

Media (and Operation Mockingbird)
Except for Forbes, we deliberately left out large media companies in this last section, as their presence in the Pilgrims Society and influence on society deserves to be discussed separately.

The New York Times and Time Magazine have been the news publications the most intimately tied to to the Pilgrims of the United States over the years. Since 1896 the New York Times has been owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, members of which have been generational members of the Pilgrims since the very beginning. Orvil E. Dryfoos, who married a daughter of Arthur Sulzberger and rose to president of the New York Times in 1957 and publisher in 1961, was another member of the Pilgrims. A number of outside Pilgrims held senior positions in the New York Times too over the years. Among them were John William Harding, George McAneny, Philip Du Val, Cyrus Vance and Charles H. Price II.

Time Magazine was set up by Henry Luce in 1923. Although he himself appears not to have been a Pilgrim, most of his associates were, including some of those who financed the founding of his magazine: J. P. Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont and Dwight Morrow,
together with the Harriman and Harkness families. Among the Pilgrims that have held senior positions in Time Magazine are Paul Gray Hoffman (OSS-CIA), Philip G. Howlett, William J. Cross, Hedley Donovan, Donald M. Elliman, Jr., George A. Heard, Roy E. Larsen, Samuel W. Meek and Frank Pace, Jr. Henry Luce III became president of the U.S. Pilgrims in 1997. Another important Pilgrims-affiliated publication used to be the New York Herald Tribune, owned by the Reid family and dissolved in 1966. Whitelaw Reid, Whitelaw Reid II, Ogden Mills Reid, Ogden Rogers Reid and several other family members have all been members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1958, John Hay Whitney, a vice president of the U.S. Pilgrims, took over the newspaper from the Reids. Although not very prominent within the Pilgrims Society, some of Reader’s Digest most senior and long		Pilgrims-dominated U.S. publications. Some outside media are still very much in line with the Anglo-American Establishment. In case of CNN it seems that billionaire country boy Ted Turner, with his one billion dollar grant to United Nations causes, really wants to be part of an establishment for which he doesn’t have the background.
term managers have been Pilgrims, spanning the period from the 1940s to the 1980s. Among them were William John Cross, C. Robert Devine, Walter Wood Hitesman and Kent Rhodes.

News stations are considerably less prominent in the Pilgrims Society. One of the exceptions has been the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), located in Rockefeller Center and one of he most dominant broadcasting companies from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Morgan banker Owen D. Young founded the RCA in 1919. Young was chairman of General Electric, which took a controlling interest in the RCA. For the next fifty years, until 1970, the company was headed by James G. Harbord, Frank M. Folsom, and David Sarnoff. All these men, including Young, were members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1970, Sarnoff’s son, Robert, took over the chairmanship of the RCA, but couldn’t prevent the company from going into a permanent decline. Robert was ousted in 1975 and in the years after the RCA was taken over by other media conglomerates not particularly tied to the Pilgrims.

The RCA, in cooperation with General Electric and Westinghouse, had formed the NBC in 1926, which became its main broadcasting corporation. By the late 1930s, NBC had become so dominant on the airwaves that the FCC forced it into two companies, one becoming the significantly less influential ABC. At this moment it appears that the succeeding heads of both NBC and ABC weren’t invited to the Pilgrims. Of course, the Pilgrims of the RCA did continue to exert their influence over NBC for many years. One person not mentioned before is John Brademas, one of the directors of the RCA/NBC. Brademas is a perfect example of a WASP elitist. A member of both the American and British Pilgrims, he was a Rhodes Scholar, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, on the advisory board of the David Rockefeller Fellowships, a director of the Aspen Institute, a governor of the American Ditchley Foundation, a member of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission. Brademas also served on a number of Carnegie commissions.

The other exception of a broadcasting company that has been represented in the Pilgrims Society is CBS. Over the years several Pilgrims have been directors of this New York-based company, among them Henry Kissinger and Marietta Peabody Tree (vice chair Pilgrims; great-granddaughter of George E. Peabody, the famous Morgan partner). William S. Paley, the founder and continuous owner of CBS until his death in 1990, was a member of the Pilgrims Society. So was “the most trusted man in America”, Walter Cronkite, the well known anchorman for the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1982.

In the 1970s, after a number of scandals in which the CIA was implicated, several reports emerged about a working relationship between the CIA and a number of major media outlets. One of them was the 1979 book ‘Katherine the Great’ by investigative author
Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America” – a Pilgrim, together with his main employer, William Paley.		Deborah Davis, who had been interviewing people in Washington for three years. She described the Washington Post’s relationship with the CIA and how Watergate might not have been an accidental discovery. It even gave a name to the CIA’s effort to establish contacts with the major media: Operation Mockingbird. Unfortunately virtually no one was able to read the book at the time, as it was immediately forced off the market, only to be republished in 1991. About Paley and Cronkite at CBS, Davis wrote: “Paley’s own friendship with Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the
debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s… The [Washington] post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi… membership is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only.” [4]

Like Paley and Cronkite, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, could be found at Pilgrims gatherings in New York. The Alibi Club, on the other hand, was part of the “Georgetown Set” in Washington, D.C., an elite, liberal social group with strong anti-communist feelings and close connections to the New York WASP establishment. Members of the Georgetown Set included many senior CIA officers: Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Cord Meyer, Richard Bissell, and others. A few newspaper men like Washington Post owner Philip Graham and journalist Joseph Alsop — and apparently Walter Cronkite — were also part of this group. [5]

Davis and investigative reporters like Carl Bernstein have mentioned the names of important newspaper men who cooperated with the CIA. The CIA rated newspaper men among the best spies; they could go almost anywhere and ask questions without raising suspicions. At the same time newspaper men could be used to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, something which the major media outlets were only too happy to support the CIA with. As Newsweek’s foreign editor stated: “The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department…. When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. … We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” [6] All this makes a lot of sense, of course. The only problem here is that if all these media people are so cozy with their CIA and State Department friends, who is going to keep these people in line? Apparently no one, hence the long list of conspiracies in American and world history which the major media outlets prefer not to investigate. Bernstein wrote:

“Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], the National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune… By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc… When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources.” [7]

It’s interesting to note that many of these media owners have appeared in the membership lists of the Pilgrims Society. In addition to the earlier-mentioned owners of the New York Times, Time Magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, RCA/NBC, and CBS who were involved with this prestigious Anglo-American society, Barry Bingham, Sr. of the Louisville Courier­Journal, Jack R. Howard of Scripps-Howard, and the Muir family of Newsweek were also Pilgrims.

This last publication, Newsweek, from 1937 to 1961 was dominated by Pilgrims Society members. Besides the Muir influence, Newsweek was owned by the Astor Foundation, named after a family with whole generations of members in both the British as the American Pilgrims. Among the directors of the Astor Foundation also was Gates W. McGarrah [8], a first rate example of Pilgrims influence. McGarrah had been chairman of the Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank, a U.S. member of the General Council of the German Reichsbank, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, and the first president of the Bank for International Settlements. He also was a grandfather of CIA director Richard Helms.

In 1961, Newsweek was taken over by the Washington Post, the establishment newspaper from Washington, D.C. It seems the only reason no Washington Post men can be found among the U.S. Pilgrims is because the society is focused primarily on New York high society. There had been plans in the early years to open other Pilgrims clubs in cities as Washington and Paris, but these ideas never manifested [9]. Interestingly, once considered one of the most “reliable” Mockingbird newspapers, in 1992 the Washington Post revealed to its readers the contents of an internal CIA memorandum, written the year before. In part it read:

“A. Media. 1) Current program: a) PAO [CIA’s Public Affairs Office] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.” [10]

In his 1977 Rolling Stone article, Bernstein mentioned one British-based news agency (with an important New York department) that has been significantly influenced by Pilgrims: Reuters. Among the Pilgrims who have held senior positions in Reuters are Sir Christopher Chancellor, general manager from 1944 to 1959; Lord William Barnetson, chairman from 1968 to 1979; Sir Denis Hamilton, chairman from 1979 to 1985; and directors Lord Thomson of Fleet and Sir David Walker. Information on British Pilgrims is still quite scarce compared to its American counterpart, so this list of senior executives will undoubtedly grow as more historical members become known.

Among the British news outlets that have been influenced by Pilgrims are the The Observer, The Financial Times, The Economist, and especially The Times and the Commonwealth
Press Union. The press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the widely circulated Daily Express, is known to have visited the Pilgrims at least once in 1941, but is not very likely to have been a member of the Pilgrims as he was not particularly interested in an Anglo-American partnership. Pilgrims have also headed the world famous Encyclopedia Britannica. Examples are Senator William Benton, Philip M. Kaiser and Elmo Roper. Britain appears to have had some sort of Mockingbird program similar to the United States. In 1994 Private Eye magazine reported how in 1976 John Snow, a well known newscaster, had been		British media influenced by Pilgrims.
approached by a representative of British intelligence. Snow was asked if he would provide the security services with information on the political activities of his colleagues. His salary of 3,600 pound sterling would be matched and there wouldn’t be any problems with Inland Revenue. Snow refused, but Private Eye suspected that most large newspapers and media stations employed persons who had been more susceptible to this kind of approach. The magazine also wondered aloud if a recent story about the Guardian’s owner, Richard Gott, falsely tying him to the KGB, had been written by journalists on the payroll of British Intelligence. At the time Gott’s newspaper was digging into the affairs of Jonathan Aitken, a person with numerous ties to hard right national and international intelligence people. [11]

Additionally, in 1995 a person named Gerald James published his rather controversial book ‘In the Public Interest’. James had been a banker at Barings Brothers (a Pilgrims bank) and a member of the aristocratic Monday Club. He knew many people in intelligence, including the former deputy head of MI6, George Kennedy Young (who became a banker at Kleinwort). James was also chairman of the arms company Astra Holdings. In his biography/expose James wrote how a cabal of City bankers and intelligence men were running the major illegal arms deals, had infiltrated and corrupted smaller companies, and collapsed a number of them after fearing exposure in the wake of the Iraqgate scandal. James’s Astra Holdings had been among these “front companies” which had been collapsed, prompting James to write a book in an effort to clear his name. This turned out to be not entirely without risk: journalists he talked to were intimidated and several important witnesses died under suspicious circumstances. Relevant here is page 138 of his book, in which James describes his experiences with the British media:

“I have been involved with a number of journalists in researching this story [arms-to-Iraq affair]. At any one time there might be as many as half a dozen following up this or that line of inquiry and we keep constantly in touch by telephone. It is to our mutual benefit, except that the relationship, which has now been going on for for nearly five years, has frequently been marked by sudden changes of policy by newspaper editors or the unexplained removal of a journalist from the case or even from the paper (sometimes to a more exalted position on another where the arms-to-Iraq inquiry is not part of the brief.)… It never really surprised me until I was amazed to receive, from one of my other sources, a list of journalists with affiliations to MI5, on which were posted some of my own contacts in the press, indeed some who had at the beginning made something of a name for themselves on the back of the arms-to-Iraq affair.” [12]

British Pilgrims can hardly be tied to this British “Mockingbird” program, probably because there’s too little information available on the collusion between British intelligence and the press. The exception might be some of the more reactionary aristocrats in the British Pilgrims, like Sir Frederick Bennett, Lord Chalfont, Lord William Rees-Mogg and their ally in the United States, John Train, though a discussion of these people will have to wait a few paragraphs.

Education
Education is the key to success, and this is no different for Pilgrims. The majority of U.S. Pilgrims have studied at Harvard, Princeton or Yale and majored in either law or economics – if not both. It might not be a surprise then that at any time the boards of these three universities are filled with Pilgrims Society members. There are a few other universities from which Pilgrims have graduated. They include New York University, Columbia University, Dartmouth and a few prestigious European universities. MIT is popular among the small number of scientists that have joined the Pilgrims. Additionally, a good number of Pilgrims have been on the board of the American Academy in Rome, a New York-based school for artists. This is not a mainstay of the average Pilgrims education, however. It is more a reflection of the Pilgrims influence on aspects of New York social life.

In England things are even simpler: the vast majority of future Pilgrims go to Oxford and to a lesser extent, Cambridge – or they come to the United States to study at Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Cultural, scientific and revolutionary societies Next to the Pilgrims influence over the major East Coast universities, the Pilgrims are also involved in a wide range of cultural and educational institutes in New York. They include
the Museum of Modern Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Society of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society (renamed Wildlife Conservation Society), the National Institute of Social Sciences, the Smithsonian, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library. Many American Pilgrims are members of societies commemorating the revolutionary wars and the founding fathers, and since membership is usually based on achievements of ancestors, genealogical societies are not far behind. The Society of the Cincinnati is extremely popular among Pilgrims; so is the Society of Colonial Wars or the Sons of the American Revolution. The Pilgrims headquarter in New York is actually home to a whole range of societies, even though the sign at		October 26, 2007, Pilgrims headquarters. Entrance behind cars on the right.
the door only reads “New York Genealogical and Biographical Society”, which is generally also headed by a Pilgrim. Following is a list of all the societies at 122 East 58th Street: [13]

Go here to read the rest.

Partial Pilgrims Society Membership List:

Pilgrims Society

ORGANIZATION

Ostensibly a dinner club, the Pilgrims Society consists of two chapters. The London chapter of the Pilgrims Society was established on July 11, 1902, followed by the New York chapter on January 13, 1903. Its purpose is to foster better Anglo-American relationships through cooperation of top banking and manufacturing institutions.

The London society is responsible for a hosting a dinner welcoming the new US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the New York chapter hosts a reciprocal event. Curiously, most of these ambassadors have already been members for some time.

“…the existence of this Wall Street Anglo-American axis is quite obvious once it is pointed out. It is reflected by the fact that such Wall Street luminaries such as John W. Davis, Lewis W. Douglas, John Hay Whitney […] were appointed to be American ambassadors in London.” — Harvard professor Carroll Quigley

Founding Date:
11-Jul-1902